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Summary: An expanding list of concepts,
terms, and ideas of interest to the design of communication
technology, computer mediated interaction, and the human
computer interfaces to interpersonal communication |
Online Article
Glossary of Terms and Ideas |
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This glossary is a work in progress. I started it in part to
focus myself on the ideas and concepts that need explanation, and in
part to map out the territory covered both by sociology and
technology.
I have started this off with sociological terms perhaps because
they are the terms we're least likely to find in the user interface,
human factors, or computer mediated design literatures.
Unfortunately, they're also the terms around which we could
anticipate the most debate. Bear with me if you find my definitions
imprecise or woefully incomplete! I hope to revise this every few
weeks, adding terms related to current issues and problems that
concern society, the internet, communication technology, and their
design and development.
Acquaintance
The sociologist sees not
only individuals but relations. In the network relations model of
social networks, or communities, acquaintances are those people who
stand two degrees away from us. They are people we count not as
direct (or close) friends, comprising our circle of immediate
friends, but those to whom we have access because they are
friends of friends. The concept of the "strength of weak
ties" popular among network relations theorists is important because
it recognizes the critical function played by acquaintances in many
different kinds of social efforts: from finding jobs to finding
brides. These are the individuals who provide us with access to the
world of people around us, but brokered through a relationship that
bestows some degree of trust on any extended connections made. While
the idea supports some of the applications developed around
communications technologies (from dating to finding roommates), it
needs to be better qualified. It matters how an acquaintance is
introduced, and it matters what purpose the connection serves. Some
networks resist expansion while others embrace it. So, to apply the
idea of two degrees to a social network should be accompanied by
attention to the kind of interaction, its purpose, the risks and
costs involved, and its longevity (expecations for future
interactions).
Age of
Communication
The conventional historical account of
humankind's relation to technology begins with the tool, then the
early machine, the industrial age, characterized by our use of new
sources of power, and then on to the information age. By most
accounts we're still in the information age, and even the "age of
the network" is but an extension of it. I think of the "network age"
as belonging to the age of communication, and marking a departure
from information processing towards a focus on connectivity. Present
concerns with technology seem far more interested in network
connectivity than with processing power, and with enabling
communication far more than with applications designed to increase
productivity. Gains in the latter, in fact, may owe more to
efficiencies of communication than to organization in the workplace
or work-related tasks. But the point is not to split a historical
hair. It is to recognize that if technologies continue to facilitate
communication, we can no longer take human interaction for granted
and must better understand the "man-machine" interface as a
social—and not just user—interface.
Attention
We tend
sometimes to think of attention as a resource, given or taken but
always exchanged as we engage in social interaction. We should view
it instead as a kind of energy that's put into play during social
encounters. When one of us takes the floor, we don't "get" all the
attention. The attention is redistributed, yes, but it is not taken
from members of the audience and given to whichever one of us is
speaking. It's better to think of attention as a way describing
relations between people. Social encounters involve many subtle and
coded ways of distributing attention, scaling it up and down,
focusing or diffusing it, and always involving physical cues and
facework as its medium. Displays of attention get interesting when
interactants aren't physically co-present, and we need to recognize
that it's the way in which mediation disrupts the coordination of
social activity by shortcutting the negotiation of attention that
matters more than who's giving, taking, or getting. We can go so far
as to say that attention is how we get in synch with one another,
and that when mediation screens the visibility and realtime
modulation of attention, interaction loses much of its
meta-communicative value.
Attentionality
When
asynchronous applications like chat and IM approach near synchrony,
interactions can shift their focus from content to the form, or
energy of the interaction itself. For lack of a better term, we can
call this "attentionality." Near-synchronous technologies like chat
have enough delay (latency) that the flow of communication becomes
an object of attention. We see this expressed in the form of
messages designed to get attention or disrupt the "conversation" for
the sake of taking the floor. Note that attentionality isn't as much
of a concern in two-way interactions, because competition for
attention there would derail all conversation.
Binding
We bind to one another as we are
bound to a shared set of values and to a language and culture
through which to express ourselves. Binding occurs as we
communicate, as we recognize each other while also affirming the
social claims embedded in speech and performance.
Communicative
Action
"The two types of interaction can, to begin with,
be distinguished from one another according to the respective
mechanism of action coordination—in particular, according to whether
natural language is employed solely as a medium for transmitting
information or whether it is also made use of as a source of social
integration. In the first case I refer to strategic action and in
the second to communicative action. In the latter case, the
consensus achieving force of linguistic processes of reaching
understanding (Verständigung)—that is, the binding and bonding
energies of language itself‹becomes effective for the coordination
of actions. In the former case, by contrast, the coordinating effect
remains dependent on the influence—functioning via nonlinguistic
activities—exerted by the actors on the action situation and on each
other." Jürgen Habermas, p.221 On the Pragmatics of Communication
The notion that communication represents a unique form of human
action is described by Jürgen Habermas' theory of "communicative
action." It states that actors bind to one another through the
intersubjective world they create while engaged in speech oriented
towards understanding.
Of course, communication can also be intentionally deceptive—or
strategic—in practice. But Habermas' theory claims that the
foundation of all interaction is the commitment we to one another
while sustaining a shared, inter-subjective reality, or
"lifeworld."
Communicative action theory argues that in trying to reach
understanding through talk, we bind to language and culture while
also binding to one another. We bind to one another precisely
because we hold each other accountable to proper use of speech. More
specifically, we expect sincerity, factual accuracy, and normative
rightness. These are each a form of truth claim: truth in self
presentation, truth in statement, and truth in terms of normative
claim.
The purpose of using this theory is to raise the question of
whether or not (and how) binding occurs when interactions are
mediated. If we bind to and through our interactions with one
another only under the conditions described by communicative action,
the distortions, compensations, and interventions of mediation could
have profound consequences for the integrity of interpersonal and
social relations. If trust, for example, comes about through honest
interaction, and if it is produced through communication, what
impact might the erosion of trust have for our social institutions?
What amount of facework do we require to satisfactorily test each
others' claims to truth? How do we recognize sincerity through a
chat window, or facts stated on a message board? Even if Habermas
overemphasizes truth, his seems correct in claiming that speech
occupies a privileged role in the reproduction of human
relationships. It is interesting that he and others in the field of
speech act theory and pragmatics seem to assume face to face
interaction.
Community
Is community a result
of implicit or explicit membership in a group? That would seem to be
the crux of the definition. If community is implicit, then people
with similar interests could be said to belong to a community. They
would be members of a community of birdwatchers, though they do
little besides birdwatching to sustain it. If, on the other hand,
community is a product of explicit activity, then it requires
ongoing communication among members with one another and in order to
reproduce a set of codes, values, and other binding principles.
Perhaps the best way at it is to ask: what can the members of a
community do? What are they capable of? If we took this route we
would quickly arrive at a set of criteria that would include
community structure, authority figures, spheres of influence, power
distribution, population density, longevity, and more. We could then
say that community has degrees of intensity and extensity. Intensity
covers the quality or nature of relationships among members.
Extensity covers the domains of activity over which the community
has leverage or influence. An online community then would suffer
from having too little density (it's empty here!), too little
frequency (the last post is 2 months old!), either of which would
kill it off. A community lacking in cohesion fades away from a lack
of participation. A community that overdevelops, its population
growing more quickly than its core members can support, will
implode. Real and valued communication gets drowned out by noise.
Unable to stand the noise any longer, valued members flee, either to
a new community space or to the comfort of their own homes. The
fragility of community owes to its temporal nature.
Dyadic interaction
The
dyad, or pair, is the privileged structural form in human
communicaion. It's the form in which a commitment that produces
trust is most easily established. Given the turn-taking nature of
conversation, it's also the form of interaction we find most
comfortable. Even most "group" interactions involve adressing people
in turns (while holding court, we look at our audience one by one).
Could it be that the brain is structured to apprehend and respond to
just one face at a time? Possibly. Or it could be that subjectivity
is built one interaction at a time. It hardly matters. Either way,
the dyadic interaction is at the core of human communication in
terms of importance as well as prevalence.
I should say one more thing about dyadic communication. Some
theorists will emphasize the individual partners in dyadic
interactions; others will emphasize the pair as a structural form.
This much seems clear: the degree to which each individual's own
person is at stake in the interaction varies. Commnicataaion
partners can completely removed from the interaction, as subjects;
or they can be the focus of the conversation. Interactionists like
Erving Goffman claim that the context and ritual of interaction
allows communication to occur without each partner having to reveal
his or her own personal world to the other. But there are occasions
when this is appropriate, if not the goal (such as intimacy) of
interaction.
One might venture to say that the more ritualized an interaction
(e.g. the constraints imposed by technologies), the more the
intimate world calls from a distance.
Face
To continue Marshall McLuhan's
argument that media are extensions of man, communications
technologies extend the face by transforming (amplifying,
constraining, translating, and distorting) its expressive and
perceptual possibilities. However, in face to face interaction, we
extend face and make facework commitments to one another in a manner
that would seem impossible with non-face to face interaction. It
thus seems appropriate to raise the claim that communications
technologies extend the face, while recognizing that while extending
our hearing and our speech, they do little to extend its emotive and
affective capabilities.
Facework
Facework is the process
by which we use our faces to show and provide recognition and
acknowledgement to one another in communication. It serves also to
supplement speech with meaning and subtlety. Attention is a
byproduct of facework insofar as it's primarily through the face
that we give and recognize the attention at play in any social
encounter. And for that reason, the bracketing of facework that
comes with mediation diminishes the mutually beneficial emotional
payoff we normally obtain from live interaction.
Group Dynamics
In our
fascination with group dynamics online we sometimes gloss over the
fact that what looks like group interaction is really just an
aggregation of dyadic interactions. We see a list of messages and
think "group." But when we read messages, we read them from an
individual. And when we write them, we often write them in response
to an individual. The web is good at collecting posts, but that
doesn't mean that a collection is the product of "group dynamics."
Group dynamics require that we see a change in social structure, or
at least in the relations among members, such that they're manifest
in behavioural changes among members, and group transformation at
the system level.
This then is interesting; we think we're seeing group, or social
dynamics, when we see changes in an online community (e.g. social
software). Perhaps it turns into a dating community. Or members
create fake friends (fakesters at friendster). It's easy to confuse
such a phenomenon for something social when in fact it is a dynamic
response to the constraints as well as facilitating factors of a
technology system. In a system as large as Friendster, member photos
are a quick way to filter through the population. That encourages
dating (which is to say, behavior informed by physical attraction).
Likewise, since the size of population at Friendster increases
competition, fakesters and testimonials emerge as a natural
compensation.
But if this is social dynamics, it is so deeply informed by
technical architecture that it is as much an expression of technical
features as it is social dynamics.
I suspect that the most accurate way to interpret the "group
dynamics" of mediated interactions is to view the social system as
"low-intensity," and its interactions as "thin." The reason we can
have interactions in such a "community" at all is due to
technology's assimilation of social and interpersonal transactions.
Technologies perform some of the operations or functions normally
taken up in personal interaction, or embedded in rituals. The
bracketing of face to face expression lowers the emotional potential
of communication (and decreases the physical risk of physical
injury!), making it safe.
It would seem then that to grasp the dynamics of mediated group
dynamics we would have to develop a grammar or system that could
describe the mediated interactions at the interpersonal, group, and
social levels.
Illocutionary force
This
term, taken directly from speech act theory, explains the
extra-linguistic phenomenon by which we motivate one another through
speech. Whereas locution is to state something, illocution is the
power of motivating the listener by saying something. It might be
motivating agreement, or action—what distinguishes it from simply
making a statement is that the effect is measured by a change in the
listener's relation to the speaker. This kind of force, and it has
been described differently by psychologists, philosophers,
sociologists and others, is critical to analyzing the impact
technology has on communication and the production of human
relations through mediated interactions. Because if there are
attributes of illocution that depend on face to face interaction,
then clearly the intervention of technology would have repercussions
for interpersonal relationships as well as social relations at
large.
Interaction
We interact with
stateless (static) objects, dynamic systems, and each other in very
different ways. So to start off, we need to define that with which
we're interacting. This gets complicated in the case of
communication technologies because they require us to interact with
two domains at the same time: the technology, and the person(s) at
the other end. It might be valuable to look at technologies of
communication not only in terms of their place in a social system,
but as interaction systems in their own right. What kinds of
interaction do they privilege? Perhaps those are the kinds of
interactions that create emergent social phenomena. Surely a system
like Friendster.com encourages a kind of interaction practice (call
it linking, brokering, leveraging connections, social webs or
networks) that makes the dating marketplace an explicit—if not the
core—quality of its community. The kind of social system seen on
Friendster is a product of its interaction system. At issue for
designers and engineers then is How do we tweak a set of
communication tools to encourage this or that kind of interaction,
with this or that kind of effect?
Interaction Systems
Our
interactions with one another are always informed by the context in
which they take place, though we are free to go along with social
convention or to subvert it. In either case we begin with the
convention, simply because it's only through social context that
meaningful communication and interaction is possible. Without it we
would be but islands of non-communicative gibberish. The growing
adoption of technologies for the purposes of file-sharing, buying
and selling, dating, fundraising, discussion and more raises
questions concerning their role in producing certain kinds of
interactions, and certain patterns of behavior. We know the
technologies play a role in transforming "social" interaction, but
we're not clear on how to break it down. When do technologies, their
interface, design, and features block our view of others? When can
we see right through the technology to the individuals on the other
side?
All technologies of communication contribute to the interaction
systems that emerge around their use. Phones are transparent to us
(we hear right through them), but texting is not. And the same for
many online interaction systems. This self-conscious feeling we may
get while bidding in the open, posting testimonials to Friendster,
or texting in front of friends (have you not once tried to hide what
you're writing, as if it were a note being prepared for delivery in
the back row of 6th grade science class?) is testimony to the fact
that we do sense a public, but are not yet sure how we relate to it
(and it to us).
Interation systems are a combination of technical architecture
and user participation. Mapping the complexities of individual and
group behaviors is much more difficult than charting technology
design. But if we are going to leverage our understanding of social
interactions, communication, as well as interface design and user
experience analysis, we need a better understanding of how they
interact. These are dynamic systems, social environments in which
slight technical or design differences produce very different
results. And in which varying degrees of competency among the user
population also scale to create very different kinds of community or
interaction. We are only beginning to understand what interactions
systems do, and where they belong in our daily practices. Given the
constraints on time and space on communication and on physical
presence, we are likely to see more and more of our "social"
interactions move to mediated formats. For better or for worse.
Meta communication
Meta
communication refers to the meanings produced during interaction
whose sense exceeds language, or is not expressed through language.
We recognize that a lot more happens between people than what we put
into speech. The meta-communicative benefits of interaction include
being acknowledged, seen, and recognized. How these effects are
transformed by technology, and by asynchronous technologies like
email, IM, text, and chat especially, should interest those
concerned with how technology intervenes in the well-being of our
relationships to one another.
Metrics
Numbers. Our culture is
obsessed with them. We consume numbers as if they were some kind of
cereal. (Serial cereal.... One's, two's, three's, all baked into
little chewable bits of wheat and oats. Now there's an idea.) We
love numbers, rankings, ratings, polls, surveys, not to mention all
of those improbable statistics that punctuate the modern sporting
event.
But for all our interest in numbers, it's not the absolute number
that intrigues us. Nor is it even the relative number. It's the
number's movement, its direction, its trend. Numbers in and of
themselves have little meaning. They need context if they're going
to have weight. We need to see the relations between the things
measured to know what the numbers mean.
Still, context is not enough. Our culture is dynamic, and we
measure ourselves against time. Without time there's no change, and
without change, there's no value. (How do you measure value if you
don't have difference? You can't). In our culture, information,
news, talk all come down to time, and speed in particular. So we
look at numbers for their trend, measured and represented in terms
of change (which is a relative number), direction (up or down), and
speed (rate of change). Numbers, taken at face value, really don't
mean anything. We have to stop counting numbers and instead
recognize what makes numbers count.
In an ideal world, marketing would give up counting, let go of
its preoccupation with the number, and focus on what moves them in
the first place. Trends, change, speed, flow... It's communication
that drives these processes, that results in the exchange of ideas
and opinions, that makes the association between one interest and
the next.
Persistence
Our relationships
survive our separation, and thanks are due in part to technologies
of communication. For something to persist, it must endure over
time. Which is why we need to understand that technologies
contribute to a kind of temporal presence, or a presence that
persists through time in spite of physical absence. Indeed, many of
us maintain long-distance relationships in which we can feel
surprising close, emotionally speaking. To what extent relations can
persist through physical distance is and probably will be unknown
and unknowable. But that technologies of connectivity support and
enable contact to persist explains some of their popularity if not
their effectiveness.
Persuasive
architecture
This is a good term, but an imprecise term.
It's one of those terms that seems to offer a solution, while
concealing the fact that the solution is a sleight of hand.
As far as I am aware, communication (between people) is the only
experience that is truly and honestly persuasive. All other
"persuasive" phenomena are seductive, beguiling, misleading,
intriguing, enticing, etc., etc. The way I see it, persuasion is a
product of speech used to persuasive effect by one person with
another person. It's persuasive because it involves a relationship
between two people. It's the very fact of human
stakes—vulnerability, promise, obligation, commitment, etc.—that
creates persuasion. For what is persuasion if not to bend another's
will, to lead another to some conclusion against the very reasoning
that individual would have mustered against it?
Now, architecture can guide, but it can't persuade. It can
spotlight, illuminate, and with the use of hallways, doors, stairs
and more, it can steer... But none of those architectural feats will
have convinced the user of anything. And none of them will have
provided any reasons for or about anything either.
If we want to use ideas like persuasive architecture, persuasive
UI design, persuasive site design, etc., we need to step back for a
moment and own up to what we're trying to achieve.
Do we hope to convince a user of something (x) by means of
changing or shaping his or her mind about it, in such a way as that
person can convincingly convince another, and so on... In which
case, we're talking communication, speech, language, and nothing
less. OR do we wish to make emotional claims upon users and nudge
them towards the actions and conclusions we want of them, regardless
off how we really get them there? Because yellow is not a reason,
though it can be effective.
Pragmatics
Pragmatics is the
term used to cover the theoretical approach to communication in
which the performance and context of interaction is critical to
unpacking the meaning embedded in the use of speech and language. We
are using, and hopefully contributing to, pragmatics for the simple
reason that we believe the medium matters to the message. Not that
the medium is the message, but that the medium must be recognized as
belonging to the production of the message. A pragmatics of
communications technologies would address the how of mediated
communication: how media are used, for what kinds of interactions,
and in what kinds of practices. To extend pragmatics a bit further,
we suggest that mediation establishes its own domains of
interaction. The "how" is then necessary to some practices—those
that would be impossible without a technology.
Presence
We are social creatures
by construction if not by nature, and something special happens when
we're in the presence of others that we recognize without being
conscious of it. We become aware of others in our field of presence.
And we make this known, again, whether consciously or not.
Sociologists use the term "presence" and "presence availability" to
describe this, and it's of interest to us for the simple reason that
technologies today enable communication, or make us present, when
we're not present. We either have to revise what it means to be
present, or ask whether or not mediated presence amounts to the same
thing as face to face presence.
Production
format
Mediating technologies transform the linguistic
embeddedness of human interaction. Technologies either mediate the
mouth and ear, or engage writing as a secondary medium of linguistic
exchange. By arguing that technologies of communication serve as its
production formats, we emphasize the "how" of interaction (over the
content, or what, and actor, or who). This is worth noting for the
reason that most theories of communication take its production for
granted. We believe that the means of communication are significant
enough to warrant study, and that under circumstances of mediation,
we cannot take ordinary speech for granted.
Proximity
We tend to think of
proximity in spatial terms, as of a field of proximity. But our use
of mediating technologies suggests that we're capable of being in
proximity to others in non-physical terms. Perhaps we should propose
that there is an emotional proximity as dear to us as physical
proximity. Or perhaps we should test the notion of a temporal
proximity based on frequency, speed, and rhythm of interaction and
not bound to physical proximity. And there are probably other ways
of formulating this also. Either way, new proximities enabled by
communications technologies require us to negotiate ambiguities of
absence, and to engage in interactions lifted from contextualizing
situations of co-presence. These proximities characterize the age of
communication by producing new ways of interacting and of
maintaining relationships.
Seriality
Many theories of
communication maintain that interaction involves a seriality of
action in which events occur in sequence, one after the other. One
common example is the turn-taking structure of conversation. Another
is the view that much activity is constructed out of action chains
(or steps). Mediation, by lifting interaction from physical place,
dislocates the linear nature of seriality from physical presence. It
is far more difficult to negotiate turns during asynchronous
communication. We should be interested to know whether or not we
develop new skills as negotiating activities out of synch, or
whether seriality is somehow preserved even in mediated activities.
Social software
Social
software applications like Friendster, Tribe, Ryze, LinkedIn, and
Meetup, for all their differences, have this in common: they produce
social interaction. Where they differ is in their flavor. Some, like
LinkedIn and Ryze, are meant to encourage business networking.
Others serve up dating. All exist to combat the noise of the Net
(email especially), and to offer a alternative medium based on trust
(it's assumed that acquaintances trust one another, and that we
trust those who know the people we trust).
These systems seek to realize the value locked away in latent
connections, be they unrealized friendships, soulmates, or
colleagues. They see people as content in a sea of information,
where the basic power of relationships often goes unrealized simply
because it can't be recognized. So social software systems don't so
much create connections, as manifest them.
So what then, are they made of?
- Access The system provides access to members. Most
systems are semi-public; they may provide limited information
about members to non-members, or they may even limit member access
to other members (as with relation-based systems like LinkedIn).
Access is a system feature as well as a constraint. Access to
members in the system is regulated by one's own personal and
extended network, so while the system exists to create access to
people, it limits access on the basis of qualifying relations. The
greater the population of a social system, the more noise it
produces, and the more valuable its constraints become. As in any
social network, access produces cultural boundaries. It's
regulatory function defines the in and out, and the inside from
the outside. The fine line for social systems thus runs between
exclusivity and inclusivity.
- Relations Much of today's social software is designed
to exploit the intrinsic economic and communicative power of
relations, or links. Because this borders on an obsession for some
of us today, we would be wise to consider the possibility that
these online social networks simply reflect the power of links in
a networked world, and the timing of software and online services
in an age overburdened by noise and complexity. The relations that
distinguish these services are not the strong ties of first degree
friends, but the strength of the weak ties running from our
friends to their friends. If three individuals are connected by
only two ties, A--B--C, an implicit third tie exists from A--C.
That's, at least, the idea. Some social network analysis in fact
calls the triad with two ties the "forbidden triad," based on the
assumption that if A and B, B and C have strong ties, then a third
tie will exist.
The psychologist's term for interactions
among threesomes is "triangulation," and we all know how it works.
It may not make the best family structure, but it's hard to
imagine a good mystery or suspense story without it. Triangles are
uniquely prone to "ganging" behavior, in which a pair isolates the
third member. And so triangulation is that special kind of
communication in which the three parties trade information in
pairs to generate a dynamic of shifting allegiances and isolates
(A-B,C; A-C, B; B-C, A).
While social software networks
often grow their populations on the basis of a strong tie
(friendship), they exist to leverage the weak tie of
acquaintanceship. That's the implicit third tie. These systems are
actually based on implicit triads formed out of explicit dyads.
The latent third tie is assumed to be functional, even though it
may not yet be explicit. That's the software's job. (Any software
that could produce latent ties from existing, explicit links,
ought to do the trick as long as individuals have an efficient
means of contacting one another).
The value of a social
software system will quickly be shaped by the degree to which
latent ties are made explicit, for what function, and with what
kind of success. In a social system, surplus value is obtained not
from labor, but from relations. (See currency, below.)
- A currency Social systems, like economies, have
currencies of exchange. But unlike economies, their currencies
don't serve as an exchange equivalent for everything. In other
words, not everything can be exchanged for anything else. The
society values some thing or things more than others. For example,
a dating system operates with the currency of attraction. Jobs
aren't in play.
Whether it's physical, emotional,
intellectual, or competitive, attraction is the force that
organizes the system, and motivates participation. Or to take
another example, the system may value trust and connectedness—the
"who do you know" system. Here, unlike a dating system, it's about
connectedness (you get interesting results when, like Friendster,
you combine both logics in one application). Connectedness makes
members stand out, which makes them popular, which further
attracts interest, and so on. (Friendster is not about sexual
connectedness—else prostitutes would be best off—but rather uses
social connections to compensate for the anonymity of online
dating).
There are many other ecosystems/currencies:
file-sharing networks privilege volume or collection size; trading
networks value price; career networks value rank; online
communities often value seniority (competency and longevity); and
so on. In any kind of social system, the currency in play explains
"what's going on." It's really as simple as knowing what the
action or activity is, or, what people are doing. From there, we
know "how to proceed"—and that is the core feature of social
interaction.
- A Public The system creates some kind of a public. I
hesitate to say public sphere, and I'm not comfortable with
"public space" either, since it's not a space. But message boards,
discussion groups, listings, posts, who's on pages, etc., do make
the public explicit.
This public does shape the tone and
personality of the community to some degree. But it's not a public
insofar as it brings together everybody present. We do not yet
know what these kinds of systems are capable of doing. The limits
of their potential are related to how they create and produce
"publics."
- Iteration Iteration is required to get anywhere in a
social system, be it dating, career networking, collaborative
work, etc. We often miss the fact that a social system is built as
much in time as it is in a "place." The same comment goes for
communication also. Conversation, interaction, and most other
forms of social transaction (economic exchange, gift giving,
ceremonial/ritual practices) involve iterated acts, or "action
chains." Members who drop their participation in a social system
quickly fall from view.
- Multichannel Architecture As in "real" spaces, social
software applications also permit multiple channels for different
kinds of interaction. And by this is meant public and private, or
better, front and back regions. Those comments, messages, and
other posts that take place in front of everyone (who's
interested) are public interactions. It's interesting, in fact,
that you can tell that some of the interactions between two
members held in public are written for the public as much as for
the member to whom they're ostensibly addressed. Now that's
social! Back regions permit conversation among members away from
the public. At some point in the future we'll be able to add
modes: visual, video, voice. (Note that identity is not in play
here. Anonymous or pretend interactions and communication are a
form of interaction, not a feature of social architecture).
- Self Reflexivity A culture that is not only aware of
itself (as such, and as having an identity that "transcends" its
members) but in which members can provide reasons for their
behavior is self-reflexive. Members have enough knowledge of the
culture, and it is "thick" enough to be consistent, such that the
culture informs their actions, their style, in short their
participation.
In a social software system that leverages
dyadic relations into emergent social behavior, an implicit
tension exists between non zero sum and zero sum economies. A
first degree relation is assumed to be non-zero sum. That is, it
costs me nothing and it costs you nothing to communicate, to
exchange messages or information. In this sense, we do not lose
anything by communicating. Rather, we both benefit, and our
relationship gains value accordingly. In a social system, however,
constraints on resources, access to them, and hierarchies or
inequalities among participants produce zero sum exchanges. Not
everybody can get equal attention at the same time. Nor can
everybody be equally popular (else the term would have no
meaning). Though we may be "in it" together, we compete (zero
sum). Dates are obtained at somebody else's expense.
We
bring to any kind of ritualized social interaction an
understanding of what's going on, what's in play, and how to
proceed. This applies, too, in social software systems. It's an
example of self reflexivity because to proceed we have to have an
understanding of what's going on in order to successfully engage
and participate.
- Coordinates Activity The social system is useful in
coordinating activity and action. A social software application
might enable trading and file sharing, or collaboration around
work-related projects. Either way it needs to be able to direct
communication around that activity, it needs to provide various
decision points, compensate for failures, anticipate mistaken
actions, and acknowledge activity completion.
- Breath and Rhythm Social software can produce a sense
of pace, rhythm, and intensity. It breathes, and it can be felt
breathing. Sometimes we sense this in terms of action ("it's
really dead this week"). Or we sense it as scale ("it's taking
off"). A good social system can not only convey raw population
numbers, but develops daily rhythms (day-time vs late-night) and
routine regularities (not fridays or weekends). It's a fact of the
medium that temporal regularities have only a short calendar;
days, but not months. The medium built on speed has not yet begun
to exhibit a sensibility for institutional time. I think the
longest wavelength we can describe is probably the season.
(Winters are generally better online than summers.)
- Multiplexing This is a term used by network relations
theorists to describe relationships between people that are
maintained in a variety of modes and through a number of
associations. An example would be the teacher who sees parents of
her kids at neighborhood meetings, in a local book club, and who
also responds to emails. A social software system is sensitive to
real world connections. Perhaps the core strength of systems based
on links/relationships is that the relationships exist first in
the real world. Before they are used to invite new members. Online
participation is helped by the fact of real-world relations.
- Normativity Part of what makes a collection of people a
society is that the society has some claim on the behavior of its
members. Even when this claim is enforced by members themselves,
it is on behalf of the community. Some writers have referred to
the role played by "karma" on Slashdot.org. Karma is really the
same thing as normativity, though watered down a bit for lack of
physical co-presence. Normativity exists in a social software
community if its members self-censor or constrain themselves in
order not to damage their standing, position, reputation, etc. The
longer members expect to be in the group, the more they should
anticipate the community in their actions.
Social software
systems can build normativity into their design, in process,
action sequencing, temporal routines, use of pictures,
testimonials, identity authentification, as well as in constraints
on access and communication. After all, the content of any social
software system is people. However, no codification of normative
claims in the form of software controls can provide the
social function of normativity.
Social Networks
Among the
internet's celebrated features is its ability to connect people with
shared interests. These social networks become cultures in which
communication can serve to create virtual communities whose members
meet infrequently if ever. Their strength is measured by their age,
the frequency of their interactions, the density of connections
among members, and their mode of production (e.g. email, IM, chat,
blog, phone, face to face). The reason we would measure the strength
of a social network by its communication is that it's through
communication that trust is produced and maintained. Trust comes
into play in relations between members (their past experiences with
one another develop confidence and stability), in the group's
predictability, its identity (which is reflected in a certain amount
of conformism), and so on. The trust that exists in a social network
binds its members and is the weave of its social fabric. But what
makes social networks an interesting topic of study is their
dependence on communication and the fact that new technologies seem
to make many of them possible. The ties that bind over text-based
message boards may prove to be weak in the majority of communities
today, but we have little idea how powerful virtual networks might
become as video and mobile connections take advantage of greater
bandwidth and decreasing costs of participation.
Synchronization
A series of
ads during the dotcom era showed, to great effect, what can happen
when events occur out of synch. Although the company's product
involved the synchronization of PDA's and desktop applications, its
ad agency was thinking of more entertaining possibilities. There's
no doubt that we're aware of being in or out of synch with others
when we're together. And we seem to have developed the same
sensibility for mediated interactions. Communication has a
particular flow and intensity, rhythm and pacing, that artists in
time-based fields like music, film, and performance are acutely
aware of. Ignored by linguists, timing does in fact play a role in
communication. It can lend participants a sense of action, of
"clicking," being out of synch (sorts) or of being in the groove.
Athletes call this supreme synchrony being in "the zone," where
action and often interaction reaches peak performance. To the extent
that technologies intervene in our experience of timing, or in our
ability to demonstrate timing or express a sense of synchrony, they
undermine our attempts to create rhythm in our interactions. Perhaps
the stuttering effect of chat owes more to timing than to content.
If so, we would also have to argue that the quiet and isolation that
can overcome a message board or discussion list owes something to
our intrinsic sense of timing and its relation to interaction.
Talk
"What, then, is talk viewed
interactionally? It is an example of that arrangement by which
individuals come together and sustain matters having a ratified,
joint, current, and running claim upon attention, a claim which
lodges them together on some sort of intersubjectve, mental world."
Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk, pp. 70-1
Talk is arguably the most important means of reproducing society.
It's the form of human activity as which members of a society we
maintain our relationships to one another. At the same time, it is
the means by which we articulate the cultural values embedded in
language, and stand able to justify those claims—as individuals.
Through talk, we unfold our personal commitment to one another, even
if that commitment is only to continue in conversation, while
simultaneously and effortlessly reproducing the society to which we
belong.
Technologies of communication provide us with a means by which to
remain engaged in an "open state of talk," that is, a discontinuous
interaction stretched across time. This is particularly true of
asynchronous technologies, but even phone calls are sometimes a
strung-together chain of turns that must be taken together to
manifest a conversation. One of the interesting issues of mediated
interactions thus becomes the management of this intermittence, and
each participant's competence in sustaining engagement in spite of
irregular and frequent periods of quiet.
Tribes
There's been a lot
of talk about tribes (urban tribes, tribe.net). People want to know
what makes them novel. Tribes have in fact been around from the very
beginning, of course. They're the first form of social organization
we can refer back to. What's novel is not the tribe as a form of
organization, but who's in them, what they are good for, how they
are maintained, and what kind of "whole" they are a part of.
- Tribes are not just for teenagers. Here in San Francisco, we
stick with our tribes well into our thirties (and forties, shh).
What's new? That you can be a member of a tribe out of character
with your "place in society." Grown men can still build train
sets. So rather than the tribe organizing society, the tribe is
only one form of social organization.
- Tribes are not only good for hunting and gathering. They're
good for Burning man, file-sharing, and survival in the caves of
northern Afghanistan, along with much more. Informal and ephemeral
at one end of the community spectrum, rigid and binding at the
other, tribes can serve to accomplish virtually anything that
requires some kind of structured interaction and communication.
And note that the interaction doesn't have to be real time or even
face to face.
- Which leads us the third point, which is that tribes can be
maintained with the help of the internet and other
networked/communications technologies. Tribes can be joined,
maintained, and sustained through connective media. We're not
required to ride camels across an open desert to exhibit tribal
community behavior.
- And last, tribes have become interesting in part because the
society in which they "reside" has transitioned out of "mass
culture" and now supports subcultures and their differences. (As
long as they produce + consume, of course). We live in
tribe-friendly times. There's a domain(name) for every tribe. Soon
there may be a tv channel too.
In other words, what makes a tribe are its members, their
activities, their interactions, and their common context. Knowing a
bit more about what they are, we can ask what can they do.
Turn taking
"Given a speaker's
need to know whether his message has been received, and if so,
whether or not it has been passably understood, and given a
recipient¹s need to show that he has received the message and
correctly—given these very fundamental requirements of talk as a
communication system—we have the essential rationale for the very
existence of adjacency pairs, that is, for the organization of talk
into two-part exchanges. We have an understanding of why any next
utterance after a question is examined for how it might be an
answer." Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk, p. 12
This term describes the tendency in talk for speakers to take
turns at holding the floor. While one speaker takes her turn, others
are expected to listen. Much can be explained by an appreciation of
our familiarity with turn-taking rules, and our tendency to adhere
to them even in non co-present encounters. The turn-taking rules
that inform face to face interactions persist, though often in a
compromised form, in mediated interactions. Messages often follow a
reference-response structure. Calls are still answered. An
examination of mediated interactions accompanying any range of
interpersonal or social transactions would probably show that even
when things are out of step, actors rely on some version of
turn-taking to verify that actions have been completed according to
a familiar sequence of steps.
User Experience
Before they
can get started designing anything, designers have to know something
about their product's users, what they will do with the product,
why, and so on. It's been common practice in the UI design community
to design towards a smooth and positive user experience. The
customer knows best, in other words. But user experience is elusive
goal. As long as it's defined in abstract terms, it can only be
"measured" in abstract terms. So we refine our concept of the user
and give him or her something to do, and a dose of personality. Now
we have a specific user's experience. And that's easier to design
for. We can measure our product against how efficiently it enables
the user to accomplish the task at hand. And the more we know about
the user's task-orientation, and goals, the more accurately we can
create methods by which to take our measurements.
The concept of a user experience will always walk a fine line
between providing helpful design goals on the one hand, and
unattainable abstractions on the other. The reason for this is
simple. All product use is context bound: we use a product for
something particular in the here and now. The best we can do with
that, as designers, is generalize from specific uses. As designers,
however, we often wish to create a more general, nonspecific and
branded user experience—speed, efficiency, accuracy, convenience,
quality, etc.
You cannot combine the general and the specific without some
degree of compromise. Knowing where to draw the line, and what to
compromise, is critical if you are going to get the user experience
you're hoping for. Either design to targeted users (presumably to
meet business goals), or create the best of all possible generalized
experiences.
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